Deep Reinforcement Learning for Semisupervised Hyperspectral Band Selection

Band selection is an important step in efficient processing of hyperspectral images (HSIs), which can be seen as the combination of powerful band search technique and effective evaluation criterion. The existing deep-learning-based methods make the network parameters sparse to search the spectral bands using threshold-based functions or regularization terms. These methods may lead to an intractable optimization problem. Furthermore, these methods need to repeatedly train deep networks for evaluating candidate band subsets. In this article, we formalize hyperspectral band selection as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. Band search is regarded as a sequential decision-making process, where each state in the search space is a feasible band subset. To evaluate each state, a semisupervised convolutional neural network (CNN), called EvaluateNet, is constructed by adding the intraclass compactness constraint of both limited labeled and sufficient unlabeled samples. A simple stochastic band sampling method is designed to train EvaluateNet, making it possible to efficiently evaluate without any fine-tuning. In RL, new reward functions are defined by taking the EvaluateNet and the penalty of repeated selection into account. Finally, advantage actor–critic algorithms are designed to explore in the state space and select the band subset according to the expected accumulated reward. The experimental results on HSI data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms for hyperspectral band selection.